How much is too much

One of India's most celebrated entrepreneurs, the cofounder of Zerodha suffered a brain stroke very recently, he was one of the fittest and most health-conscious celebrities going around. He runs marathons, adopts a healthy lifestyle, and has achieved a great height of success with his bootstrapped company that most others could not even imagine achieving.

The reason for his stroke is not very clear, but the primary suspect is stress. 

So here I am with a question for you to answer yourself, how often do you feel stressed. 

Once a year, once a month, once a week, once a day, or multiple times during the day?

My answer to this question is multiple times during the day, even though I try and eliminate all the harmful food, I am physically more active than most people, I can easily have a conversation with a stranger, several people trust me with their secrets, and I currently earn just enough money to carry out my daily routine without having to be limited by the lack of money. I have also incorporated a habit of meditating daily, which I have been practicing continuously for the past 19 days.

The next obvious question is why am I stressed.

Probably due to lower self-confidence that arises from comparisons, not only conscious comparison but also due to unconscious comparison. Think that you have two watches in front of you, one is a Samsung watch and the other one is an Apple watch. What does our brain perceive, it perceives as one expansive and the other one as less expansive, and that's where the unconscious comparison creeps in.

I watch my friends, who have much more money than I do, buy flats, get married, celebrate international vacations, and wear new clothes almost every other day on Instagram. Even after knowing my life trajectory is entirely different from theirs, my brain starts its default behavior as comparison and starts blaming itself for being the inferior one. We seldom compare ourselves with the ones below us in any field.

I have taken the problem of stress very seriously and here is what I am doing to cope with it.

1. Slowly removing the comparative words like less, more, good, better, bad, and best from my day-to-day dictionary, and replacing them with more descriptive words like different and unique. We don't realize what effect our constant unconscious repetition has on our thoughts.

2. Converting more religious, I was a religious child initially due to my grandmother's impact, later my mother tried to make me more religious by forcing rules and rituals on me, which I revolted against it being a scientific and logical person, but my same scientific and logical rational makes me follow my religious practices better now. I think ritual helps you stick to a discipline, and practice makes you more humble, believing that there is a greater power beyond us who will take care of us, and lift almost half of the invisible load that we continuously carry on our heads.

3. Counting your blessings, and being thankful that we didn't land on the unfortunate side of things. We could easily have been in a position so worse than this even with our best efforts, and being grateful for all we have is a good way to make yourself feel good in a world where there are a lot of things pointing fingers at us.

4. Eliminating the use of social media, even though it is portrayed as a great connectivity tool, it is nothing other than your time and attention harvester, which sells ads at a truckload of prices, you are made to watch those ads, with a byproduct of losing your mental peace and self-worth as well.

5. Move away from a consumption economy, the world is constantly trying to sell you things, and making you believe that the more you have the happier you are. Ask yourself a question is it really true.

Would you prefer to live in a room with considerable empty spaces or with just a tiny corner for your body to lie on?

6. Meditate, and you will thank yourself for doing so. It helps you detach from your thoughts that is nothing less than magic in today's time. With you being forced to focus on everything going around you, a practice of seeing things from a non-reactionary side would do more good than you could ever imagine.